Thanks for joining me on my crafty journey. I'm now retired which gives me the chance to spend a lot more time indulging myself in my crafty habit!!!
I'm part of four Design Teams and absolutely love the work I do with them.
It's very exciting to get your work shown on TV and I never cease to get excited when a show is coming up. It's lovely to see what the team have produced.
I appreciate all my followers on my blog and thank you all so much for following my journey.

Followers

Friday, 28 February 2014

"Wow thank you so much to all the 75 entries into the Love and Romance Challenge. Well done to our winner and the Top 5, so difficult to choose as the entries are so good.

The Challenge for this month is Flower power and I thought I'd like to use the Pretty Petal Stamps to make my flowers. I wanted to do something slightly different so decided to use the. Caught in Crystal technique for my flowers.

Sorry for the amount of pics in this blog but I thought you may like to see how I did them. This is what I started with in the picture below.

I wanted quite bright colours and, as I didn't have many bright coloured alcohol inks, I also used Promarkers which I scribbled onto the acetate with the alcohol inks.

I also added some Perfect Pearls.

I the. Added the Crystal Lacquer.

I put the tissue paper on top of the above.

If necessary you can add more ink at this point. Then it has to be left overnight to dry,

I stamped and embossed onto the acetate once it was dry using the Pretty Petal stamp. I then cut them out and for the smaller flowers I cut the petals in half.

This is one of the large flowers using the whole petals. I started with a circle of card and used Cosmic Shimmer glue to arrange the petals and added a matching gem to the centre.

The sentiment was stamped onto craft foil and layered up on black and the caught in crystal sheet,

Thank you for sticking with me to the end of this lengthy blog and I greatly appreciate your comments,

Monday, 24 February 2014

For my entry into this Challenge I decided to use stamps rather than a stencil to make my embellishments. I used Maimeri Iridescent paste mixed with Distress Inks and Pan Pastels to colour the paste. This was then spread onto the stamps which had been well inked with Black Adirondack. It then takes 1-2 days for the paste to dry thoroughly, the thicker it is the longer it takes to dry.

I clear embossed the stems of the flowers onto one of the large Ranger Size 12 Manilla tags and then stamped the grasses with Forest Moss Distress Ink before adding clear embossing powder. I then swished it into Spiced Marmalade, Mowed Lawn and Mustard Seed DI to which I'd added water on my craft mat.

I added a couple of stamps and some lines which I did by inking up the side of a ruler with Adirondack ink and then stamping this onto the tag.

The leaves were stamped onto card and cut out, then applied with foam pads to give some dimension to the tag.

The seam binding was coloured using Mowed Lawn and Mustard Seed Distress Ink.

I would love you to leave your comment below as I must appreciate all the visits to my blog.

Sunday, 16 February 2014

My entry for the Pan Pastel Challenge blog this week should include fabric/canvas. I decided to use a canvas for the base of the project which I covered in Salty Ocean and Mustard Seed Distress Ink, I love the green that this combination also produces.

I had some lovely butterfly serviettes which I tore to pieces and used the bits I liked best!! These were applied with Glue and Seal.

The fabric part of my project is in the flowers - I took some linen fabric and used the Tim Holtz Tattered Floral garland die to cut the flowers. I then coloured the flowers with metallic Pan Pastels. After layering up the flowers I added Black Distress Glitter for the centres and attached them to the canvas.

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

A quick Valentine card using A little Jar of .... From Little Musings. Background made using Tim Holtz mask and the large hearts are made from paper clay. The lid of the jar and the edge of the label has Silver Wink of Stella applied but it doesn't show up on the photo.

Thursday, 6 February 2014

I made this tag to enter into the Pan Pastel Challenge and the Indigoblu Challenge. It's based loosely on the Tim Holtz 12 Tags (very loosely as I had virtually no ingredients) but fitted both my favourite Challenges perfectly.

To make the Tag I used a homemade heart stencil for the large heart and the background hearts. These were stenciled with red Pan Pastel and then blended into the background. I then stamped with Versamark into the heart an do the background, all stamps came from the Indigoblu Good Times set, then pounced with the same red Panpastel. As I wanted to use a black card for the sentiment I took a deep breath and edged the tag with Black Pan Pastel to pull it all together.

I then cut out four small hearts which I coated with Glossy Accents and red glitter.

For the sentiment I didn't have any ingredients for the blackboard effect, I therefore took some black card which I stamped with white Brilliance Ink and added dots and dashes with a white pen. As I didn't have any chalk I used White Panpastel which I thought worked extremely well. I mounted this on to white card and arranged, along with the hearts, onto the tag. I didn't have an arrow so I cut one out of silver mirri card. I then added red and black ribbon and hope you like the outcome.